Podcasts religion Holy Smoke My sister Carmel on her cancer and her faith

My sister Carmel on her cancer and her faith

Published: Jan. 29, 2019, 11:21 a.m.

This is a picture of my sister Carmel and I having tea a few days after our mother\u2019s funeral. She looks cheerful, doesn\u2019t she? That\u2019s because she was: although we both missed our mother intensely, and always will, we had done most of our grieving before she died, as we watched her tortured by Parkinson\u2019s disease and severe dementia.\xa0

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Carmel looks well, too. And she thought she was. Ovarian cancer plays that trick on women. The first symptoms tend to be annoying rather than alarming. A few weeks after this photograph was taken, I was reassuring her that Irritable Bowel Syndrome is a common response to bereavement \u2013 which it is. But that\u2019s not what was wrong with her. On November 1, I was sitting next to her in the consulting room at Guy\u2019s Hospital when the specialist confirmed that she had advanced ovarian cancer.\xa0

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Carmel is my guest on today\u2019s Holy Smoke podcast. Please listen to it. I guarantee that you\u2019ll be surprised by what she has to say. And you will understand why I\u2019m so proud of my sister.

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Presented by Damian Thompson.